love poetry

Little dog's rhapsody in the night (Percy Three)

He puts his cheek against mine
and makes small, expressive sounds.
And when I'm awake, or awake enough

he turns upside down, his four paws
in the air
and his eyes dark and fervent.

Tell me you love me, he says.
Tell me again.

Could there be a sweeter arrangement? Over and over
he gets to ask it.
I get to tell.

by Mary Oliver

Blue Iris

Now that I'm free to be myself, who am I?

Can't fly, can't run, and see how slowly I walk.

Well, I think, I can read books.

“What's that you're doing?”
the green-headed fly shouts as it buzzes past.

I close the book.

Well, I can write down words, like these, softly.

“What's that you're doing?” whispers the wind, pausing
in a heap just outside the window.

Give me a little time, I say back to its staring, silver face.
It doesn't happen all of a sudden, you know.

“Doesn't it?” says the wind, and breaks open, releasing
distillation of blue iris.

And my heart panics not to be, as I long to be,
the empty, waiting, pure, speechless receptacle.

by Mary Oliver

hourglass : a last love poem

i loved you
as much as i could
as long as i could
hard as i could
hard as it was

steadily holding on
to the small piece of maybe
that was finally destroyed

i have done all i can

we came together
in our respective corners
at the bottom of an hourglass
with our own strengths
our own wounds

marriage is to be found
in the voyage
through the tiny neck
of this timepiece

crossing up and over
to the opposite quadrants
those qualities of the other
missing in ourselves
are to be absorbed
for each to become whole

my love
hard as we tried
we simply did not make it
through the passage
the wounds too deep
the rage too loud
the voice too silent

and though i love you
i cannot be
married to you
i lost myself
in the giving of everything
to you

i now know
heartbreak in one
is a pain
unable to be healed
by the other

we can only
heal ourselves

for months
i have been nowhere
and everywhere
wheeling my home behind me
into the havens of others
now i need to land safely
inside the space of my own

i was starving to death
before hunger finally saved my life
waking me to desire

and now you are
free from the wanting more
than i could give
and i will love you
beyond the wound

by Nancy Levin

Aimless love

This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,
I fell in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining room table.

In the shadows of an autumn evening,
I fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor’s window,
and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.

This is the best kind of love, I thought,
without recompense, without gifts,
or unkind words, without suspicion,
or silence on the telephone.

The love of the chestnut,
the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel.

No lust, no slam of the door –
the love of the miniature orange tree,
the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower,
the highway that cuts across Florida.

No waiting, no huffiness, or rancor –
just a twinge every now and then

for the wren who had built her nest
on a low branch overhanging the water
and for the dead mouse,
still dressed in its light brown suit.

But my heart is always propped up
in a field on its tripod,
ready for the next arrow.

After I carried the mouse by the tail
to a pile of leaves in the woods,
I found myself standing at the bathroom sink
gazing down affectionately at the soap,

so patient as soluble,
so at home in its pale green soap dish.
I could feel myself falling again
as I felt its turning in my wet hands
and caught the scent of lavender and stone.

by Billy Collins

West wind # 2

You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me. Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and your heart, and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks – when you hear that unmistakable pounding – when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming – then row, row for your life toward it.

by Mary Oliver

Flowers

Some men never think of it.
You did. You’d come along
And say you’d nearly bought me flowers
But something had gone wrong.

The shop was closed. Or you had doubts –
The sort that minds like ours
Dream up incessantly. You thought
I might not want your flowers.

It made me smile and hug you then.
Now I can only smile.
But, look, the flowers you nearly bought
Have lasted all this time.

by Wendy Cope

Verona

Directly in front of my bench, perhaps thirty yards away from me, there is a startling woman. Her hair is black as the inmost secret of light in a perfectly cut diamond, a perilous black, a secret light that must have been studied for many years before the anxious and disciplined craftsman could achieve the necessary balance between courage and skill to stroke the strange stone and take the one chance he would ever have to bring that secret to light.

While I was trying to compose the preceding sentence, the woman rose from her park bench and walked away. I am afraid her secret might never come to light in my lifetime. But my lifetime is not the only one. I will never see her again. I hope she brings some other man's secret face to light, as somebody brought mine. I am startled to discover that I am not afraid. I am free to give a blessing out of my silence into that woman's black hair. I trust her to go on living. I believe in her black hair, her diamond that is still asleep. I would close my eyes to daydream about her. But those silent companions who watch over me from the insides of my eyelids are too brilliant for me to meet face to face.

The very emptiness of the park bench in front of mine is what makes me happy. Somewhere else in Verona at just this moment, a woman is sitting or walking or standing still upright. Surely two careful and accurate hands, total strangers to me, measure the invisible idea of the secret vein in her hair. They are waiting patiently until they know what they alone can ever know: that time when her life will pause in mid-flight for a split second. The hands will touch her black hair very gently. A wind off the river Adige will flutter past her. She will turn around, smile a welcome, and place a flawless and fully formed Italian daybreak into the hands.

I don't have any idea what his face will look like. The light still hidden inside his body is no business of mine. I am happy enough to sit in this park alone now. I turn my own face toward the river Adige. A little wind flutters off the water and brushes past me and returns.

It is all right with me to know that my life is only one life. I feel like the light of the river Adige.

By this time, we are both an open secret.

by James Arlington Wright

The ever-crumbling edge

Love is not something you find, for if you can find love, you can lose it. If it can be given, it can be taken away, and you end up fearing love as much as you long for it, because you have made it into a ‘thing’, a form, a commodity, something far from yourself, something you have to win, or deserve, or be ‘good enough’ to be given.

Throw away your unworthiness today; love is not a prize.

Love is not your ideas about ‘love’; love cannot be stolen by thought. All of your beautiful concepts are too small, or too second hand, or too untested. Throw out your ideas; let them burn in the fire of presence. Have the courage to find out what love actually is for you, even if this means tasting ridicule and rejection, and sinking ever more deeply into your aloneness, so deeply that you may never return.

Friend, you never have to leave yourself to reach another, for you carry every ‘other’ in your own heart. And the more connected you are with your breath, with the earth and with your weight, with your joy and with your sorrow, with your precious aloneness and the slowness of time, the less you need to abandon yourself for connection, and the more intimate you feel, without even trying; so that your aloneness becomes your way of meeting this world, and your loneliness breaks open into each new morning, held in a fresh awareness unbound by guilt.

You have reached the world by reaching ever more deeply into your centre; there was no centre, but there was a world. You pulled the sky out from your heart, and the oceans sprung from deep within your belly. So play, rest, laugh, weep, fall to the ground, and think of all the good things you have been given; the day has laid herself bare in front of you.

Something ancient stirs now, and it is joy.

by Jeff Foster

Love sonnet XVII

I do not love you as if you were salt rose, or topaz,
Or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
In secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
But carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
Thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
So I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

by Pablo Neruda

Love constant beyond death

The final shadow that will close my eyes
will in its darkness take me from white day
and instantly untie the soul from lies
and flattery of death, and find its way
and yet my soul won’t leave its memory
of love there on the shore where it has burned:
my flame can swim cold water and has learned
to lose respect for laws’ severity.
My soul, whom a God made his prison of,
my veins, which a liquid humour fed to fire,
my marrows, which have gloriously flamed,
will leave their body, never their desire;
they will be ash but ash in feeling framed;
they will be dust but will be dust in love.

by Francisco Gomez de Quevedo